“The Middle Ages hangs over history's belt like a beer belly. It is too late now for aerobic dancing or cottage cheese lunches to reduce the Middle Ages. History will have to wear size 48 shorts forever.”

“Dip a slice of bread in batter. That's September: yellow, gold, soft and sticky. Fry the bread. Now you have October: chewier, drier, streaked with browns. The day in question fell somewhere in the middle of the french toast process.”

“Some families ran their own little version of the Middle East.”

“It's never too late to have a happy childhood.”

“Are You Ready for New Urban Fragrances?Yeah, I guess I'm ready, but listen:Perfume is a disguise. Since the middle ages, we have worn masks of fruit and flowers in order to conceal from ourselves the meaty essence of our humanity. We appreciate the sexual attractant of the rose, the ripeness of the orange, more than we honor our own ripe carnality.Now today we want to perfume our cities, as well; to replace their stinging fumes of disturbed fossils' sleep with the scent of gardens and orchards. Yet, humans are not bees any more than they are blossoms. If we must pull an olfactory hood over our urban environment, let it be of a different nature.I want to travel on a train that smells like snowflakes.I want to sip in cafes that smell like comets.Under the pressure of my step, I want the streets to emit the precise odor of a diamond necklace.I want the newspapers I read to smell like the violins left in pawnshops by weeping hobos on Christmas Eve.I want to carry luggage that reeks of the neurons in Einstein's brain.I want a city's gases to smell like the golden belly hairs of the gods.And when I gaze at a televised picture of the moon, I want to detect, from a distance of 239,000 miles, the aroma of fresh mozzarella.”

“In referring to her earlier statement that he had was not her type because he was "a dollar short when it came to maturity and a day late when it came to peace." I may have been wrong about that," she conceded. "You are a complicated man, but happily complicated. You have found a way to be at home with the world's confusion, a way to embrace the chaos rather than struggle to reduce it or become its victim. It's all part of the game to you, and you are delighted to play. In that regard, you may have reached a more elevated plateau of harmony than...ummph.”

“This is the room where Jezebel frescoed her eyelids with history's tragic glitter”